GREECE.

Greek Jewry in the Holocaust.The major stages in the destruction of Greek Jewry include the deportation from Bulgarian-occupied Thrace and Macedonia in March 1943; the deportations from German-occupied Salonika and its environs from March to May 1943; and the deportations from the former Italian zone after Italy's surrender (September 1943), in March, April, and the summer of 1944. All the deportations took place after the Italians had recognized that the war was lost.This attitude, plus their antipathy to German brutality, caused Italian military and diplomatic personnel to aid as many Jews as possible to escape, either to the Italian-occupied zone or out of the occupied Balkans.In April 1941 the Jewish archives and libraries in Salonika and Athens were confiscated by Einsatzstab Rosenberg. During the spring and summer of 1941 Germany stripped Greece of its edible and cash crops and sequestered its natural resources. In the resulting famine of 1941 and 1942, which severely affected the Greek population, the Jews suffered especially. On July 11, 1942, nine thousand Salonikan Jewish males aged eighteen to forty-five were humiliated and later assigned to Organisation Todt labor battalions within Greece; many died and others suffered from disease and exhaustion. The Jewish community sought to ransom the young Jewish laborers, but the communal leaders did not succeed in raising the needed sums. To compensate for the remainder, the famous Jewish cemetery of Salonika was expropriated, turned over to the municipal authorities, and destroyed.The first Greek Jews to be deported were those of Macedonia and Thrace, which had been annexed by Bulgaria. In mid-February 1943, the Bulgarian minister of internal affairs, Petur Gabrovski, agreed to the deportation to the Reich of 20,000 Jews, including those of Macedonia and Thrace. The deportation was organized by Yaroslav Kalitsin, chief of the administrative section of the Komisarstvo za Evreiskite Vuprosi (Commissariat for Jewish Questions) in Bulgaria. He established three concentration points, at Radomir, Dupnitsa, and Gorna Dzhumaya. At 4:00 a.m. on March 4, 1943, the Jews of Thrace were arrested, interned for several days in tobacco warehouses, and sent by train to Bulgaria. Only some 200 Jews escaped the roundup, either by fleeing to the Italian zone or by having been drafted into labor battalions. The remaining 4,100 were sent by train and barge to Vienna and then by train directly to Treblinka, where they were gassed on arrival.The local population in the Bulgarian zone was completely cowed by savage German reprisals for acts of sabotage and dissent (beheading, mutilation, firing squads, and so on). Bulgaria was determined to repopulate the new territories with Bulgarian peasants, and it encouraged Greek migration to the German zone. Even so, some Jews who escaped the roundup were hidden or escorted to the partisans in the mountains. Many acts of kindness by non￾Jews toward the deportees are recorded, along with acts of theft.In the German-occupied zone, Dieter Wisliceny and Alois Brunner, representing the office of Adolf Eichmann, orchestrated the deportations through the Judenrat (Jewish Council) headed by Chief Rabbi Zvi Koretz, who was appointed its president in December 1942. During February 1943 the Nuremberg laws were implemented through Dr. Maximilian Merton, adviser to the German military administration, and the Jews were mainly isolated in three ghettos: the Hagia Paraskevi district, the so-called 151 quarter, and the Baron de Hirsch transit camp, all in or near Salonika. From the last they were transported by train to Auschwitz during March and April. Some 48,000 Jews were deported; 37,000 were gassed on arrival and 11,000 were selected for the labor camp. Between April 30 and May 8, 1943, the Jews of Dhidhimotikon, Orestias, Florina, Veroia, and Souflion were arrested by the Germans. They were brought to Salonika, and shipped to Auschwitz on May 9. Most were gassed on arrival as part of the seventeenth Salonikan transport.The last transport from Salonika, which included the Judenrat (74 individuals), went to Bergen-Belsen in August 1943. The Wehrmacht supplied all the trains, at the command of Gen. Alexander Lohr of Army Group E.The Greek leaders made numerous protests to the Greek government and the Italian and German occupiers. About one hundred and fifty Salonikan lawyers, after approaching Simonides, the Greek governor of Macedonia, appealed to the government in Athens to at least shift the goal of the deportations from Poland to a Greek island. The response was that the Germans would not allow it. Salonikan Jewish refugees in Athens, aided by Athenian Jews, tried to pressure the government. They were joined by the intellectual and religious leadership, especially Archbishop Damaskinos and the heads of the institutions of higher learning, who argued eloquently on behalf of the Jews.However, Dr. Constantine Logothetopoulos, who headed the government in 1943, wanted to settle the Greek Orthodox refugees of Bulgarian occupied Thrace in the vacant Jewish quarters of Salonika. His halfhearted attempt to stop the deportations through a letter to the German plenipotentiary in Athens, Gunther Altenberg, on March 23, 1943, arrived too late. On March 29, Athenian non-government leaders made an appeal, unprecedented in occupied Europe, to Prato, the political secretary of the Italian embassy, to halt the deportations of loyal Greek citizens. This too failed, because Salonika was in the German zone. The government of Ioannis Rallis protested to the Gestapo over the deportations, contributing to an atmosphere in which the Greek Jews were assisted by the population. In particular, Professor Nikolaos Louvaris, the minister of education and later of communications, expended considerable effort to save the Jews.The officials in the Italian consulate in Salonika - consul Guelfo Zamboni, vice￾consul Cavalliere Rosenberg, Stabila, Emilio Neri, Doefini, Merci, Mark Mosseri, and Valerie Torres - assisted Jews to escape to the Italian zone. All their efforts helped many hundreds of the three thousand Salonikan Jews to escape to Athens. More than three hundred held false Italian documents issued by the consulate. The surrender of Italy brought under German control the remainder of Greek Jewry, which had hitherto enjoyed the protection of Gen. Carlo Geloso, the Italian police commander in Athens and administrator of southern Greece, and his successor, General Vecchiarelli. Under the direction of Wisliceny, with the assistance of SS general Jurgen stroop, 800 Athenian Jews were arrested and deported to Auschwitz, along with Jews from smaller mainland towns who were arrested on March 24 and 25, 1944: Arta (352), Preveza (272), Patras (12 families), Chalcis (90), Volos (130), Larissa (225), Trikkala (50), Ioannina (1,860), and Kastoria (763). Most were gassed on arrival.The Jews of Corfu were arrested on June 6, 1944; nearly 1,800 out of 2,000 were sent to Auschwitz, of whom 200 were selected for forced labor and the remainder gassed. On July 20, 1,700 Jews of Rhodes were sent by way of Piraeus to Auschwitz, where 700 were selected for forced labor and the rest killed. The 260 Jews of Canea were arrested on May 21, 1944, and the boat carrying them sank mysteriously; there were no survivors.According to extant Auschwitz figures, at least 54,533 Greek Jews were transported there. Of these (for whom figures are available), 41,776 were sent immediately to the gas chambers and 12,757 (8,025 men and 4,732 women) were selected for forced labor, the orchestra, medical experiments (sterilization and experiments involving twins), and the Sonderkommando.Periodically, Greek Jews were assigned to the Auschwitz crematoria in 1943 and 1944. One group of 400, selected in the summer of 1944 to expedite the destruction of Hungarian Jews, refused the assignment, knowing that the punishment was death. The incident is reported by a number of Auschwitz survivors. Also in the summer of 1944, Albert Errera of Larissa, part of an ash￾emptying detail, wounded his guards and escaped across the Vistula.Recaptured, he was tortured to death. One hundred and thirty-five Greek Jews, former officers in the Greek army, participated in (and perhaps instigated) the revolt that broke out on October 6-7, 1944 (or on September 9, according to some sources). Greek survivors claim responsibility for blowing up Crematorium III; nearly all those involved died singing the Greek national anthem.By August 2, 1944, there were 292 Greek men in Auschwitz I (the main camp), 929 men in Auschwitz II (Birkenau), and 517 men in Auschwitz III (Buna-Monowitz), in addition to 731 women. Most of the Salonika women and men selected for forced labor died subsequently from the cold, hunger, typhus, dysentery, and the cruelty of guards. Many committed suicide when they learned the fate of their families. The above-mentioned 400 (or 435) Jewish prisoners, who were from Salonika, were gassed after refusing to serve in the Sonderkommando; and at least 135 Greeks died in the Sonderkommando revolt. Many of those who survived into 1945 left with the death marches of January 17 to Mauthausen, Bergen-Belsen, Stutthof, and other places. By the end of the war, the survivors numbered only in the hundreds. Fewer than 2,000 of the more than 54,000 deported returned to Greece.In August 1943 about 300 Salonikan Jews were part of a contingent comprised of non-Polish-speaking Jews, sent to Warsaw to recycle the ruins of the ghetto. That October a second group of Salonikan Jews was sent to the Warsaw ghetto. Many died from starvation and disease. Shaul Senor, a Salonikan Jew from Palestine (later hanged for attempted escape), is credited with saving many sick prisoners. At the end of July most of the Greek Jews were transferred to Dachau. During the Warsaw Polish uprising of August and September 1944, the surviving Greeks participated in the fighting or hid in the bunkers. Many were killed by the Germans, and a few by anti-semitic Poles who took part in the revolt. The Greeks split up to improve their chances of survival. Later, some re-formed as a unit and fought under a Greek flag. Only about 27 Greeks survived that revolt.Greek Jews were active in the resistance in Greece both before and after the formation of organized fighting partisan units. The Greek resistance went through several stages. Soldiers who were demobilized after the war with Italy or the surrender of Greece to Germany formed militant bands in the mountains. They were organized and supplied by the British Middle East Command late in 1942, especially those in Epiros, who were republican or royalist (EDES, EKKA). Others fled to areas in central Greece (the Pindus and Olympic ranges) controlled by nationalist democratic forces with a strong Communist leadership (EAM/ELAS). Active military resistance against the Germans did not begin until well into 1943.A number of Jewish communities survived in their entirety or in part. All the Jews of Agrinion (40) dispersed into the countryside, and the planned deportation of Zante (275) never took place. Most of the Jews of Thessaly and central Greece - Volos (750), Katerine (35), Larissa (500), Trikkala (450), Kardhitsa (100 to 150), Chalcis (270), Athens (2,000), and Patras (200) - hid with neighbors, fled to the mountains, or escaped to Palestine by way of Turkey.The Greek population in the Italian-occupied zone rallied to the support of the Jews, whom they publicly acknowledged as Greek citizens. The successive Greek governments protested, though ineffectively, against the deportations from the German zone in 1943. Leading intellectuals in Salonika and Athens submitted protest letters; the Germans closed the University of Athens in retaliation for protests. The Greek Orthodox church, led by the metropolitan of Athens, Archbishop Damaskinos, resisted, by making formal protests; by issuing encyclicals to the clergy, calling upon them to protect Jewish refugees; by hiding Jewish children (over two hundred and fifty); and by issuing false baptismal certificates. More than six hundred Greek clergy were arrested and many deported as a result. The Athens police supplied forged papers. The foreign consulates of Spain, Turkey, and Italy protected any Jew who could remotely claim their citizenship. Those so saved numbered many thousands.The Greek underground hid Jews, smuggled them to unoccupied Greece, or transported them to Turkey. Their efforts also aided many of the Palestinian Jewish soldiers, trapped in Greece after the collapse of the British Expeditionary Force in 1941, to escape from the Germans.